MEMORY EXERCISES

There’s anger in the destiny because the grey wolf is coming. So what? Because it will break down all the doors, because it will bring out the dead so they devour the living, so that there are only dead and the living disappear ...
Alejandra Pizarnik
(Alejandra Pizarnik, “Los poseídos entre lilas”, in Pizarnik: Poesía completa y prosa selecta, Buenos Aires, Corregidor, 1993)

We’ve seen it all. The images of the horror, of the torture, the places of detention and extermination, a river of corpses, we’ve heard the witnesses, the testimonies, we’ve attended the trials, the protests for justice. No, we haven’t seen a thing. Forty years ago the bloodiest civic-military coup in our history took place.

The start of the last dictatorship, 24 March 1976, entailed not only the rolling out of the military government’s political and repressive plans, the breaking up of revolutionary projects, the practice of State terrorism, and the systematic abduction of people, but also a profound transformation of Argentina in economic and social terms. 30,000 disappeared. 30,000 men, women, children and elderly, dead without a grave. To know you have to imagine, says Didi-Huberman. To remember you have to imagine, he insists. The unimaginable is an excuse. Images are clues, fragments of memory, possible testimonies, networks, roads or destinations. Images and sounds as triggers of processes of reflection in dialectic coordination with documents. Without closure, without the possibility of total understanding, in its hesitation, the image proposes that it be investigated. And questioned. And announced. The image that thinks is erected in perpetual search. No, the horror cannot be represented.

Ten Argentinean artists propose a new space of reflection, personal perspectives migrating between times and materialities. An echo, a collective construction, an insistence, an exercise. Ways of announcing one’s presence, forms of not disappearing. Exercises that are written on bodies, in thoughts. Exercises like screams.

With works by Magdalena Cernadas, Christian Delgado and Nicolás Testoni, Gustavo Fontán, Ana Gallardo, Hernán Khourián, Ignacio Liang, Martín Oesterheld, Jonathan Perel, Juan Sorrentino, Carlos Trilnick.
Curated by Gabriela Golder and Andrés Denegri.
In collaboration with BIM – Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento and UNTREF – Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero.

Screened in loop on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.